Holiday Road - 1931 Franklin

Three generations, two countries and immense wilderness with a 1931 Franklin

Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

Herbert H. Franklin, and the men who worked for him, formed a group of individuals who did things their own way and thought nothing of breaking sharply with convention. First of all, Franklin never intended to build cars. In 1892, Franklin was a newspaper publisher, of all things, in the Hudson River town of Coxsackie, New York. He was approached by an employee of a valve manufacturing firm in town, who had an idea for a process that would allow metals to be cast under pressure, and was looking for financial backing. Franklin thought it over, agreed to supply the money himself, and just that quickly, was in the business of manufacturing castings.
He left the newspaper behind without looking back, and headed to Syracuse, then a major commercial and industrial hub in central New York, and opened the H.H. Franklin Manufacturing Company in July 1893. The process turned out to be disarmingly simple but enormously effective, allowing for the casting of intricate metal shapes that might otherwise require slow, costly hand machining. Then, as now, the molten metal or alloy is forced by a plunger through a tube and into the cavity of a mold, or die, where it remains under the plunger's pressure until the metal solidifies or hardens. The plunger retracts, pulling any excess metal with it. Ejector pins then pop the finished part out of the die. Franklin was the first person to cast aluminum in this fashion, and if he'd never accomplished anything else in his lifetime, he still achieved immortality among today's model-car buffs by perfecting the process of die-casting, even to the point of coining its name.
Around the same time, a young athlete named John Wilkinson had found a post as an engineer with the Syracuse Bicycle Company, but his interest in the few automobiles that existed then was intense. He completed a pair of air-cooled prototypes for a venture called the New York Automobile Company, which never paid him for the vehicles. Wilkinson then made the acquaintance of Alexander T. Brown, a major investment banker in upstate New York, who introduced him to Franklin. In came the lawyers, and by 1902, Franklin had absorbed Wilkinson's erstwhile "employer" and the first Franklin automobile was built. From the outset, Franklin cars employed Wilkinson technologies that would endure as long as the firm did: Overhead valves, finned cylinders cast singly from iron, topped with aluminum heads and then bolted to an aluminum crankcase. As a result, during the company's tenure, Franklin built some magnificent cars, widely respected for their innovative engineering and jewel-like quality.
Herbert H. Franklin has been deceased for half a century, but you've got to believe he'd grin and nod knowingly if he knew of the exploits of the Lamphere family, variously of Vermont, Tennessee and Alaska, and their fleet of Franklins. He'd be most interested in the 1931 Franklin Series 15 long-wheelbase sedan owned by third-generation Franklin enthusiast David Lamphere and his wife Cereta. It's a car that's been driven hard its whole life, and modified gradually by his father, who could have taught Franklin a thing or two about being a my-way-or-the-highway maverick.
"My father was kind of a strange person," David began the story. "He was a nuclear physicist. Need I say more? He wouldn't drive anything but Franklins. He did research. When he got this car, you couldn't get these sized tires any more, so before a trip, we'd go to junkyards and gas stations and buy 10 or 12 of these used 6.50-19 tires to load on the roof. My father worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and on one trip back to Vermont, we had 11 flats in a day and a half. The tires were filled to 50 pounds, so when one of them let go, it really made some noise."
You may already be getting the idea that the Lampheres formed an ambitious, self-reliant family, and you're right. The story begins in West Rutland, Vermont, where David's grandfather, George Lamphere, was living in 1919. Born to a huge family living in abject poverty in the endless Vermont mountains, George was determined to improve his lot in life, and started out delivering milk. He ended up buying the creamery from his employer, and then later turned it into a general store, selling vital goods to the community. George was single, and by David's recollection, liked the ladies, so he bought a 1919 Franklin Series 9B because it was already considered a premium car. George Lamphere went on to serve as a Vermont state representative in the 1950s. His Franklin, unrestored, is in David's collection today.
Unlike George, his son, Richard Lamphere, was an only child, obviously blessed with a powerful intellect. As David put it, "My dad had a very highly tuned mind in terms of all technological things." He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduated with a degree in the then-burgeoning field of nuclear physics, and joined the staff of Oak Ridge as a scientist in 1947. That was barely five years after construction on the complex in southern Appalachia was first begun. The site was chosen for two reasons: its remoteness, and its limitless supply of hydroelectric power from the Tennessee Valley Authority. Oak Ridge was the site of the Manhattan Project's early theoretical and practical research into nuclear fission. When the Lampheres arrived from Vermont, the entire town was fenced in and patrolled by armed sentries who enforced airtight security 24 hours a day. Richard Lamphere did development work on experimental nuclear piles being tested as possible sources of electric power. Not surprisingly, given his history in Vermont and Tennessee, he loved the outdoors and arranged to have his summers free to travel the still-wild countryside. By this time, he was driving a blue 1929 Franklin Series 135 sedan.
"My dad took summers off, and every year we went someplace," David said. "Usually either Wyoming, Alaska or back to Vermont. He took the '29 and the '31 Franklins to Alaska twice each. In the 130 Series, the cooling air came up and over the top of the cylinders, but on the 140s, it came around the sides. In the summertime, when he'd be really pushing the car, doing 55 or 60 mph, that old engine was really cooking and the front seat would become uncomfortably hot.
"We picked our way out through Laramie, Wyoming, up the Snowy Mountains and up near Medicine Bow. There were lots of little lakes all around. My father was the real king of the ground campers: No tent, just a sleeping bag and a canvas, his fishing pole and his reel. We lived on fish, usually either rainbow trout or cutthroat trout. We'd carry along canned bacon-most people today have probably never heard of that-to grease the pan, add some cornmeal and fry the fish. You could almost reach up and touch the clouds."
Richard Lamphere left Oak Ridge in the middle 1960s. His son explained, "He was always a temperamental guy, and he didn't want to work full time. David, now married to Cereta, moved to Los Angeles, where she was working as an emergency room nurse. The constant stream of crime victims, even in the '60s, "forced us to decide where we really wanted to live, and not to live," and they returned to Vermont, near Essex Junction. David's father opted to become a retired Tennessean. By then, he had bought the 1931 Series 15 sedan around 1950 from an Ohio physician, a nearly original, low-mileage car. Richard intended to spend his retirement in the wilds as much as possible, and began modifying the car for serious long-distance travel.
As he bought it, the car was prototypical final-days Franklin. The engine is a 274.2-cu.in. OHV straight-six. The finned iron cylinder assemblies, looking like they were pirated from a Henderson motorcycle, are individually bolted upright to the crankcase, which, like the cylinder heads atop them, is aluminum. The Ray Dietrich-designed body features the "radiator" shell that Franklin reluctantly adopted in 1924 after his dealer network threatened to hand in their franchises unless a "modern" Franklin, without the previous shell-free, Renault-like sloped hood, was built. Just behind the shell is a huge Scirocco centrifugal blower driven directly off the crankshaft, which draws copious cool air around the engine. The exhaust manifold travels forward, wraps around the front of the engine and then directs heat at the updraft intake manifold. Then Richard started modifying it.
"He first took a quarter-inch off the heads, so instead of the normal 5.3:1 compression ratio, it's now up to something like 7:1, so there's a lot more power and the car gets 15 mpg, even though it weighs over 4,000 pounds, at least," David said. "He added all those gauges and switches inside for features such as a vibrating ignition setup for quicker starts, electric fuel pumps to select fuel from the added spare gas tank, and carburetor heat for cold weather starting. He also added oil-temperature and oil-pressure gauges as well as a fuel-pressure gauge, the latter being especially useful with older rusty fuel tanks. He was the kind of guy who always wanted to know exactly what was going on under the hood. He put in Stellite valve seats so he wouldn't have to worry about the engine knocking from low-octane fuel. He put in an extra gas tank; the stock one holds about 18 gallons and the extra one, under the right-rear floor, holds about 12. He even hand-made a geared mixture-control system from some scrap brass and gears, because he knew it would run too rich going over the Rockies because of the altitude (on that note, he also retrofitted an altimeter to the dash). The only things that failed were things that he created, like piston skirt expanders, which failed once and led to a broken rod. He was a do-it-yourself guy who didn't like to ask other people for help. Typical Vermonter, in other words."
Richard intended to carry the car heavily loaded when he made his next 4,000-mile cruise to Alaska, and this time did get help, from his own father. As Richard explained, "The original roof was just chicken wire and cloth, and my father knew he was going to use the car pretty hard; carry a lot of stuff. My grandfather was a pretty decent carpenter, and made an inside headliner from oak planks. Then my father took a bunch of galvanized-steel strips, used vinegar on them to etch them a little, then laid them sideways across the car, soldered them together and painted the roof black to look like the original fabric top."
Richard Lamphere took his road-trip-ready Franklin and headed for the midnight sun, a round trip that sometimes took three months. He hated motels, and usually camped on the ground except for a few extremely remote bed-and-breakfasts where he was friendly with the proprietors. When the road surface turned to muck or an early snow fell, he put on tire chains and kept going. He once loaded the Franklin onto a railroad flatcar and rolled into deserted northwest Canada, across the Yukon and the Selwyn Mountains on into the Northwest Territories, to Yellowknife and Great Slave Lake. Of course, he returned to Vermont with souvenirs: two gutted moose lashed to the car's reinforced roof.
"He'd be heading back in late fall, so the meat was usually frozen when he got back to Vermont," David recalled. "Moose is dark meat with a fairly strong wild taste. It's pretty tough, and it's not very good, but that was what we lived on a lot when I was young. You can make a stew with it, cook it as a pot roast, or some people like to soak it or marinate it in wine. Or you can make a steak, but you're really going to have to chew it."
David and Cereta don't subject their journey-hardened Franklin to such hard use today, but it does get out to car shows and is occasionally driven. The right-front fender still shows wrinkles from the roadside repair his dad performed after nailing a moose one night in Alaska. (The moose, improbably, survived.) Today, the Franklin emits an almost diesel-like clatter, particularly when cold, and the interior environment is unexpectedly loud, underscoring another factor in Franklin's demise, high-priced competitors such as Packards' development of much quieter, more refined powertrains. Even at moderate speeds, the steering requires constant attention and correction, although the ride is appreciably solid, thanks to the full elliptic leaf springs, another Franklin signature akin to air-cooling and overhead valves. David, a wellness consultant, added, "My wife is a minister, and we were on our way to a church over in Saint Albans, and it turned out she'd forgotten her handouts, so we turned around, got them and got back on Interstate 89. We were doing 70 and 75 mph the whole way, and made it on time, but you've got to pay a lot of attention and it helps to have two lanes."
Full Classic status or not, the Lampheres will keep their treasured family artifact as it is. As David explained, "To bring it back to completely original condition would be a real task, and I'm more into using it than restoring it as a Classic. Besides, when we go to a car show, there are all these cars that are almost perfectly restored, and what do most of the people stop to look at?"
He jerked a thumb at the moose-hauling Franklin-a scientist's captivating, recreational experiment.

This article originally appeared in the February, 2006 issue of Hemmings Classic Car.